46 - Scientific and medical books, 1695–1780

Summary

Eighteenth-century Britain witnessed both the rise of a consumer culture and the emergence among the public of an intense curiosity about the natural world and humankind’s place in it. The intersection of these forces produced a flood of scientific and medical literature, including journals, pamphlets, broadsides and books. Recent scholarship has emphasized that the early modern scientific and medical book was the product of a messy, often contentious, process of negotiation among various parties – author, bookseller, printer, scientific or medical community, etc. – all of whom contributed in some way to the creation of an item that was at once a physical object, a text, a set of ideas (which might or might not be innovative, or even ‘true’), the basis of an author’s credibility and a bookseller’s commodity. Consumers bought books in order to gain access to one or more of these elements. Once purchased, a book could become something else to its owner, transforming (perhaps) into a scholar’s obsession, a child’s scrapbook, a lady’s companion or just one of hundreds of elegantly bound tomes adorning the walls of a gentleman’s library.

From among these myriad meanings we can tease out some generalizations about scientific and medical books. First, eighteenth-century scientific books – including texts on the physical and natural sciences, as well as mathematics and applied mathematics – were produced not just for practitioners, but also for gentlemen amateurs, curious ladies and middle-class schoolboys. Similarly, medical texts – including works in physiology, anatomy, pharmacy, and the various medical and surgical practices – made these disciplines more accessible and comprehensible to potential patients and at-home practitioners, as well as to the expanding community of medical practitioners. Within the bookselling community, certain firms came to be associated with both types of literature: thus, for example, scientific publishing was a speciality of John Nourse, William Innys, Andrew Millar, and the Longman and Rivington families, while John Murray of London and Charles Elliot of Edinburgh were known for producing medical books.